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No, I won’t write your 500-word SEO article for $5

Apparently there are people out there willing to write articles or web content for peanuts. (Where, you ask? Mostly likely in India, the offshore bulk content capital of the world.)

Before I put a “rates” page on my website, I used to get a lot of emails with requests for quotes from people who were obviously looking to get the most content for the absolute cheapest price.

Since content has become king, you can almost divide website owners/managers into two categories:

People who run a serious website for their business or organisation and need high-quality copy that is unique, persuasive and professional. These people understand they need to hire a professional copywriter who may need to spend a few hours getting each web page absolutely right – which is a one-off investment that will definitely pay itself off very quickly.

And on the other side, you have:

People who want to quickly grow a low-quality website (or several very similar websites) with massive amounts of content for other purposes, such as having pages on which to put Google ads. These people don’t really care exactly what’s on the page, whether it’s written logically or in good English, or whether the content will actually have any value for readers. And these people just want to pay as little as possible for this “whatever” type of content.

On my web copywriting rates page, I have made it clear that I do not supply bulk amounts of almost random, copy-and-paste type of content. Please look elsewhere if that’s what you’re after.

I spend the necessary time to understand your business and your products or services and write professional, persuasive copy targeted exactly at your potential customers.

The explanation on my website seems to have stopped 90% of the bulk/cheap writing requests. Which is just as well, because I was really wasting my time responding to quote requests from people who had no intention of hiring a professional copywriter.

But sometimes I still get them. Some people must not bother reading a few paragraphs on a website before sending out a standard email that probably goes out to 50 others, just so they can pick the cheapest one.

I got another one yesterday, it said something like this: “I have 100+ SEO articles that need to be written. US$5 per article. Does that sound good to you?”

Well, NO, it doesn’t. As a minimum, let’s say a professional copywriter spends 2 hours writing one good article. That would be US$2.50 per hour. A 40-hr working week would make this person a grand total of US$100 in a week or US$400 in a month! Enough said.